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For his first computer-animated film, Katzenberg had gone to a fellow computer-animation company based in the San Francisco area, Pacific Data Images. Would kids, for example, get a kick out of hearing the voices of Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, Saturday Night Live alums, as bumblebees? No, but their parents, who might have grown up watching the bumblebee characters on the early seasons of SNL, might.Īntz arrived nearly two months before A Bug's Life, and was a modest start at best for DreamWorks. This would end being an extreme example of what became the DreamWorks Animation ethos: no matter the premise, ensure that a lot of big-name celebrities are present, making references kids won't get but parents will, and hope it all works out in the end. There would be a live-action arm, but Katzenberg was even more focused on the animation side. (Nor was he on board with Katzenberg demanding the position or promising to leave, an ultimatum he issued the day after Wells died.) So in the fall of 1994, Katzenberg created a studio of his own with Steven Spielberg and music impresario David Geffen, titled DreamWorks SKG.
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The tragic and untimely death of Frank Wells, the company's COO, had led Katzenberg to believe that he would become the new number-two of the burgeoning conglomerate, but Eisner wasn't on board with the idea. Katzenberg had left Disney with great displeasure. Katzenberg had just one question: when was this new film opening? When Lasseter took him up on this offer, he launched into his pitch for A Bug's Life as a way of informing the executive what Pixar and Disney were working on next. Katzenberg said he wanted to talk, and just have a friendly chat.
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Lasseter took Katzenberg at his word - as alleged in that article, The Pixar Touch, and Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs - and arguably should not have. And when he departed on acrimonious terms in the summer of 1994 - as fate would have it, Lasseter first pitched A Bug's Life the same day that Katzenberg's departure was announced - the ex-Disney executive extended a hand to Pixar, inviting them to meet with him whenever they wanted, even as he started a rival studio. Before the studio's first film was released, he was one of their staunchest advocates within Disney. Just as Katzenberg was an integral figure in the Disney Renaissance, he would prove to be an antagonistic figure within the early chapters of the Pixar narrative. Lasseter was, of course, referring to Jeffrey Katzenberg. The personal language may seem cutting or even melodramatic.until, that is, you realize the history laden behind its use. Lasseter made no bones about it: in an article at Business Week in the late 1990s, he said he felt "betrayed" by the head of DreamWorks, who he believed was attempting to sabotage A Bug's Life. įor Pixar, there was a very clear and disturbing similarity between their bug-themed film and Antz, the first film released by DreamWorks Animation. But the plot that kicks in during A Bug's Life - inventor ant Flik (voiced by Dave Foley) gets the idea to hire a group of warrior bugs to scare off the grasshoppers, only to realize too late that the warriors he's chosen are actually a motley troupe of performers with zero skill or interest in bloodthirsty fighting - is a hybrid of Akira Kurosawa's legendary Seven Samurai and the 80s comedy Three Amigos. Stanton and Ranft acknowledged that the Aesop fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper was a jumping-off point for the story, in which a meek colony of ants is beset upon by a bullying group of grasshoppers who always stroll into town to steal a large amount of the food the ants have picked for themselves. Even though the prospects of Toy Story weren't fully clear in the summer of 1995, Disney CEO Michael Eisner was intrigued enough by the story treatment for Bugs (as it was originally called) to greenlight it as Pixar's second film.Ī Bug's Life is a rarity in Pixar's filmography: though it's technically original, its writing was inspired by a number of obvious sources. Insects, like toys before them, were easier to handle with computer animation, especially at a time when audiences didn't crave photorealism from the characters placed within such high-tech filmmaking.